Chapter 9

 

School photos!

 

The two simple words that strike fear into the hearts of even the most brave.

 

I hated them, and the only thing worse than having them taken was when you had to see the result.  They were always awful – you could guarantee that you would always have a double chin, sticking up hair or shut eyes.  To make the whole thing even more humiliating the offending objects were always handed out in registration.

 

I saw the pile lying on top of the register immediately, they were placed downwards of course, but that didn’t stop people seeing your picture.

 

After our names had been checked off Mrs Miston picked up the pile of photos and slapped them onto the front desk.  She then called our names, passing the photos face down along the eager outstretched hands. 

 

The idea was that they would be passed along to the person without being seen – however this was never the case, before they’d even got half way round the room someone had turned them up the right way and everyone would start sniggering.

 

I could see mine before it had even got to me, I cringed as I saw my face passing between hands until it finally landed on my desk.

 

In all honesty it wasn’t too bad, I couldn’t really whinge.

 

“Gorgeous photo,” a voice whispered in my ear and I felt myself smile.

 

“How’s yours?” I replied.

 

Reluctantly Simon pressed his photo into my hands, unlike mine it wasn’t very flattering, his eyes were fixed on the ceiling and his chin stuck out.

 

I couldn’t help but laugh.

 

“Charming,” he retorted, wrestling the photo out of my arms.

 

I couldn’t wait to see the rest of my friends’ pictures, but it wasn’t until a few hours later that I finally managed to catch up with Jemma and Rena.  They were standing in a corner of the foyer, whispering to each other and giggling.

 

“Your photos were that good?” I asked.

 

“We’re not looking at ours,” Rena commented and pointed towards the notice board.

 

I followed her finger until I found myself face to face with the school football team photo.

 

“This?” I asked, looking back at them.

I was met with a couple of eagerly nodding heads and so turned my gaze back to the photograph to see what the fuss was about.

 

I finally noticed the fuss, he was sitting on the front row, centre, the captains band placed firmly round his upper arm and the ball balanced on his lap.

 

Benjamin Big Shot Adams.

 

“Doesn’t he look amazing?” Jemma smiled, appearing beside me and examining the photo again.

 

I looked again, I’d never seen him in his football gear before, I never took much interest in the school teams, I found sport quite boring.

 

It was a nice photo though, he was wearing a red shirt, and red seemed to be his colour, it showed off his dark hair perfectly and his legs – wow! Most guys have awful sparrow legs, but Ben’s were lovely – all big and muscly.

 

“See you’re enjoying the view as much as us!” Rena snapped me out of my trance.

 

Damn! I’d just done it again!  I can’t believe what a perv I am.  I found it so hypocritical that I was standing here lusting over Ben’s legs when I hated him so much. 

 

I shook myself to my senses and walked away.

 

“So you do think he’s sexy then?” Rena called after me, refusing to let me go.

 

“He’s an idiot,” I replied firmly.

 

“But a sexy idiot?” Jemma asked hopefully.

 

“Maybe.”

 

And that was the most they were going to get out of me!

 

OK, so maybe I did find Ben attractive, but it was pretty hard not to, if you managed to resist his good looks you were pretty much inhuman. 

 

“I’m going to buy it!” Rena declared, “I’m going to buy the team photo.”

 

“You cant!”

 

“I can, and I will.”

 

I smiled inwardly to myself – I may find Ben attractive but at least I wasn’t completely loopy like the members of his fan club. 

 

The day I got to be like them would be the day that I had lost my soul.

 

At that moment the bell rang to signify the start of yet another lesson.  Inwardly I groaned, as my feet shuffled in the direction of the mobiles.

 

Lessons in mobiles were awful, we must have been the only school that still had them – I’m sure that Jarrold High was breaking some kind of education law, it had to be child abuse to make us sit in a freezing damp box on wheels for over an hour. 

 

To make matters worse, this lesson was drama.  I hated drama with a passion, if you weren’t an egomaniac it was rather hard to fire up any kind of interest in making a fool out of yourself.

 

“I soooooo don’t want to be here,” I whispered to my friends as we climbed up the metal stairs and entered the room.

 

Luckily they both hated drama as much as me and so nodded in agreement before reluctantly joining the circle of cross legged students that covered the floor.

 

To me it seemed rather old fashioned having drama in a mobile, most other schools in the area had a drama studio … we could never get away with calling our classroom anything as glamorous as that!  Although slightly bigger than the other mobiles it was still just as dingy, we’d just had theatre style lights attached to the walls but they couldn’t disguise the fact that the place was falling to pieces.  The interior was dark, probably not helped by the fact that it had a coat of thick brown paint all over the walls and an even darker coloured carpet.  Large wooden blocks lay all over the mobile, these were the only tools we could use in our drama pieces, in year 7 it had been fun to build them into mountains and then climb up them, but these days we tended to use them more to sit on.

 

10 minutes later we were still sitting there, with no teacher, and as usual this had triggered the inevitable debate of whether or not we should walk out and go and hang somewhere else instead.  Every time this happened the same conversation would take place.  We knew that the “right” thing to do was go to the school office and tell them we were teacher less, but who in their right mind was going to do that?

 

“Right, I suggest we just all get up and walk out,” the leader of the discussion bellowed out across the room.

 

“Yeah great idea Sean,” a sarcastic voice echoed in response, “and what happens if we bump into a teacher on our way out?”

 

Sean sighed at his peers lack of commitment to the cause, and once again launched into the reasoning behind getting up and leaving.

 

If anyone was going to conduct this mission it had to be Sean.  There isn’t really a lot to be said about Sean Herd really – well apart from the fact that he got off with Jemma last year (the girl had drunk far too much that night!).  He was the year’s rebel, and so it wasn’t terribly often that we got to see him in school, when we did we knew about it as he was always getting himself in trouble. 

 

“Look,” his voice carried on, “this is only drama it’s hardly important to the curriculum”

 

I snorted quietly to myself, since when did Sean care about anything on the curriculum.

 

At that moment a sharp whistle sounded out across the room and the door swung open.  

 

We all sat in silence for a moment, praying that we weren’t about to be met by the wrath of the Headmaster.

 

“What’s going on in here?” a timid female voice asked behind us.

 

“Oh mi god its Cookie!” one of the boys yelled out in delight and immediately 6 of them had jumped up and were dancing around the woman in the door yelling “Its Cookie, its Cookie” at the top of their voices.

 

She blew her whistle again, but they ignored her, instead encouraging more people to get up and join in with their ridiculous dance.

 

“Boys,” she called, her voice trying to sound firm but trembling a little with unease, “please sit down or I’ll have to go and get the Head.”

 

The boys calmed down and went back to their places in the circle.

 

The woman smiled and moving across the room sat herself down with her.

 

I smiled back at her, a sympathetic smile, as I knew what she was about to endure.

 

Mrs Cookie was a wonderful person, sweet in every way.  You could really imagine her being the kind of mother that would let you make cakes every day of the week and lick the bowl out afterwards, she was a lovely lady, but she made a rubbish supply teacher.  She had been at Jarrold ever since I could remember, and ever since I could remember she hadn’t been able to keep control of the class.

 

“Right, what did you do last lesson?” she asked everyone once they had more or less settled down.

 

Immediately everyone started talking at once, the noise reaching fever pitch once again. 

 

Mrs Cookie blew her whistle again and we all fell silent.

 

“Right one person please,” she pointed to one of the girls who sat across from her.

 

The girl smiled in an angelic way, “we are meant to be watching a video this lesson.”

 

“Right, anyone have any idea where the video player is?” Mrs Cookie beamed at us, her eyes shifting around the room for sight of a TV.

 

I rolled my eyes, every single time she fell for this trick, it was amazing that she hadn’t cottoned on to it yet.  I’d lost track of the amount of times we’d been allowed to watch a video when we weren’t supposed to.

 

She got up and began to move around the room, looking everywhere for the non existent television.  I felt sorry for her, more than anything I would have loved to have got up and put her out of her misery, but I knew that life in high school wouldn’t be worth living if I did that, so instead I joined the rest of the class in watching her search for the missing object.

 

Eventually her eyes rested on the teacher’s desk, and she found the note containing the work we were really supposed to do.

 

“Oh, you’re supposed to be studying your Macbeth,” she beamed at us, clutching the piece of paper tightly in her hand.

 

Everyone let out a groan and began fishing through their bags looking for their plays.

 

So far we had managed to waste half of the lesson, and it was beginning to look like we’d have to work through the rest of it.

 

For the next 10 minutes we read through the play, each of us taking parts, sometimes the boys would put on funny voices and pretend that they were farmers or women with high pitched voices, but even this soon began to loose its comedy element.

 

It wasn’t until half way through the first Act that things began to liven up again.  It started when Mrs Cookie looked down at the book and read out an extract from the stage directions.  While her gaze was fixed downwards one of the blocks that was positioned in the middle of the circle began to shuffle ever so slightly forwards.  We all giggled, but when Mrs Cookie looked up the block stopped moving and we all immediately went back to our texts.

 

She frowned before continuing – the block moving a few more inches.

 

Another giggle ran throughout the group and Mrs Cookie, put down her book.

 

“Now, I don’t know what you are laughing at, but it’s very childish.”

 

Everyone laughed some more.

 

“Do you want me to go and get the Head?”

 

We all settled down again and she went back to reading.  The block moved again, this time however she was too quick for us, looking up just in time to see the block about to head out of the mobile door.

 

“Who’s under there?” she called out.

 

No answer.

 

“I’m being serious,” she said, “whoever is under that block come out.”

 

She was met with more silence and so giving up she left her place and lifted the block up, to be met with a grinning Sean crouched down on the floor.

 

“Sean!” she said in exasperation just as the bell went.

 

I was somewhat thankful for the disruption, there is nothing better in the world than really really dreading a lesson only to go to it and to find that it isn’t so bad after all. 

 

The rest of the day went really quickly and by the time it got to 4.00 pm I was in high spirits.

 

I hummed happily to myself as I walked through the school and out to the back playground where the buses assembled to take us home.

 

It took me a moment to even notice a group of people all standing around in a huge circle in the corner of the tarmac.  I knew immediately what it meant – a fight.  Normally I wouldn’t have been bothered about going to have a look at it, but this time something made me head towards it.

 

Craning my neck over the group of people, I made out the figure of a large dumpy girl who I recognised as being in the year below me.  She had her arms locked round a smaller girl and I could see her really pulling at her hair.  I stood up on tiptoes and noticed to my horror that the other girl was Gillian.

 

I pushed my way through the crowd and entered the arena of the fight.  My heart went out to my friend, she was crouched down on the floor, her whole body trembling and tears streaming down her face.

 

“Get away from her,” I spat at the large girl, moving towards her to block her from Gillian.

 

“And who’s going to make me?” the girl replied.

 

“I’ll give you detention,” I said firmly. 

 

“Ooooooh scared,” the girl said sarcastically, I was having no effect on her whatsoever, if anything it looked like she was about to start on me as well.

 

Just as I was beginning to wonder what on earth I could do to defuse the situation the crowd parted again and Kelly Homer appeared.

 

“What’s going on?” she said, her voice booming out strong and confident.

 

“Nothing,” the large girl sneered at her.

 

The whole crowd gasped – no one had ever talked to Kelly Homer in that way before.

 

She raised her eyebrows at the girl, and carefully stubbing out her cigarette on the ground made her way over to her.

 

“Doesn’t look like nothing to me,” she spat out, “now either you get the hell out of her right now, or I’ll make sure that you are never liked by a single person in this school ever again.”

 

The girl was beginning to loose her confidence now, she backed away from Kelly a bit, obviously wondering whether or not to do as she was told.

 

At this moment Ben appeared behind Kelly and the girl moved back through the crowd – facing the two most popular kids in the school was not something that should be done.

 

“Are you OK?” Kelly asked Gillian softly, giving her a hand and helping her to her feet.

 

Gillian let out a little snivel, but then recovered enough to shower Kelly with enough thank yous to last her a lifetime.

 

“And what are you doing here Kimberly?” Kelly turned to ask me.

 

I trembled under her gaze and looked down at my feet.

 

“Shouldn’t you be sorting out situations like this?”

 

“I was trying,” I murmured quietly.

 

“Right well, not hard enough it seems,”

 

I looked up and she was smiling at me – to everyone else in the crowd it probably looked sympathetic and friendly, to me it was pure venom.

 

She was completely patronising me and trying to show me up in front of Ben … and my friend.

 

I glowed a deep shade of red and muttering my thanks to Kelly I shuffled out of the way, not daring to look back at the people that were staring at me

 

As I made my way on the bus I knew that Ben’s gaze was fixed directly into the back of my head.